[dornan]

Rent control is beneficial to incumbent long term tenants but is pretty bad for everyone else including those who are looking for an apartment. It's one of the many "pro-renter" regulations that constrains supply and makes rent higher.

Price controls don't work for groceries or gasoline, why would they work for rent?

If you can find data in support of such a policy I'd be interested to see it.

[frosted-flakes]

Rent control serves as a means to add stability. If landlords could evict tenants without cause and immediately rent to someone else for $100 a month more whenever the market changes, they would. That's bad for everyone.

The problem is that when a tenant has been renting the same place for 20 years with the landlord raising the rent as much as legally allowed each year, and it's drastically below market rates, but if the landlord evicts them they can't rent to anyone else for a year. The solution to that is to build more housing to bring down market rates so that people aren't trapped in one place forever.

[johnnyanmac]

Yes. But the thing is incumbent renters don't really have many rights in the US. The landlord is perfectly free to kick you out by not renewing the lease, and they need no reason to not renew it. So any benefits can be nullified by the very party the law is trying to protect you from.

>Price controls don't work for groceries or gasoline, why would they work for rent?

Whats the alternative? They increase rent to the point where people are kicked out anyway? Every option leads to unattainable rent except for the rich.

[JoshTriplett]

The alternative is to build more houses, and keep building, and keep building, until everyone can afford it. You cannot solve a supply shortage by controlling price; that just transforms an affordability problem into an availability problem. You solve a supply shortage by increasing the supply.

[johnnyanmac]

Sure. What's the intermediate solution while we face inevitable zoning lawsuits, economic constraints from recession, and other NIMBYism? By the same logic we should have had a high speed rail built pre-COVID. But if there's one thing laws know how to do, it's stall.

[JoshTriplett]

The intermediate solution is to build a little more housing, everywhere that you can win those battles, and encourage people to disfavor more restrictive areas until those restrictions are finally defeated. You cannot solve a supply problem by restricting prices, you can only turn an affordability problem into an availability problem.

[johnnyanmac]

You're assuming the people are able to move out of the restrictive areas and find work in the less restrictive areas. That doesn't tend to be how urban density works, unfortunately. Mayyybe if we had the high speed rails ready it'd have merit...

I woildnt mind moving to central valley if we weren't in an age where everyone is RTO'ing and there's zilch for tech jobs in Fresno and Bakersfield. Cheaper housing with no job market is a net negative.

>you cannot solve a supply provlem by restricting prices

Is it really a supple provlem, though? The US keeps saying it's unemployment and homelessness is so historically low. It seems more like housing is getting greedy and doesn't care how many leave the city. Tha very much can be fixed with proper pricing controls.

[JoshTriplett]

> You're assuming the people are able to move out of the restrictive areas and find work in the less restrictive areas.

No, I'm not assuming that. It's an awful thing that many people do not have flexibility in where they live. That's made more awful by restrictions on building that make it difficult for people to live affordably in many places.

You asked for an intermediate solution; the intermediate solution is "do what we can, where we can, while working towards the full solution".

> Is it really a supple provlem, though? [...] It seems more like housing is getting greedy and doesn't care how many leave the city.

The ability for housing to charge higher prices is a supply problem. There's much more demand than supply, so if someone can't pay the asked rent, the next person coming along will; as long as that demand is higher than the supply, price controls can't solve the problem. For the most part (ignoring some additional perverse incentives we should also address, which sometimes lead people to leave rental properties empty for a long time), if that wasn't happening, the rents would go down until there's a tenant willing to pay them. If it's possible for people to raise rents massively and still have tenants, build more houses until that's no longer possible.

(There are other ways to "solve" the problem, but they aren't desirable ones. If the local job market collapses, demand will go down massively, and there will no longer be a supply shortage, so rents will go down (or get converted to sales, and sale prices will go down). That's not a positive outcome for a location, or for the people in it. I mention this only because there can be other markets, other than housing, where "decrease demand" may be desirable rather than "increase supply".)

There are additional depths of complexity here, in that the market for sales and the market for rents interact in a variety of ways, as well as the job market in various locations and the market for sales/rentals. "build more" is still the answer to a lot of those problems, but I still want to acknowledge the additional complexity.

[daedrdev]

Build housing since we aee clearly in a shortage since they can raise rent so high